Your DRM Can Watch You Too: Exploring the Privacy Implications of Browsers (mis)Implementations of Widevine EME
Authors: Gwendal Patat (Univ Rennes, CNRS, IRISA), Mohamed Sabt (Univ Rennes, CNRS, IRISA), Pierre-Alain Fouque (Univ Rennes, CNRS, IRISA)
Volume: 2023
Issue: 4
Pages: 306–321
DOI: https://doi.org/10.56553/popets-2023-0112
Abstract: Thanks to HTML5, users can now view videos on Web browsers without installing plug-ins or relying on specific devices. In 2017, W3C published Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) as the first official Web standard for Digital Rights Management (DRM), with the overarching goal of allowing seamless integration of DRM systems on browsers. EME has prompted numerous voices of dissent with respect to the inadequate protection of users. Of particular interest, privacy concerns were articulated, especially that DRM systems inherently require uniquely identifying information on users' devices to control content distribution better. Despite this anecdotal evidence, we lack a comprehensive overview of how browsers have supported EME in practice and what privacy implications are caused by their implementations. In this paper, we fill this gap by investigating privacy leakage caused by EME relying on proprietary and closed-source DRM systems. We focus on Google Widevine because of its versatility and wide adoption. We conduct empirical experiments to show that browsers diverge when complying EME privacy guidelines, which might undermine users' privacy. For instance, we find that many browsers gladly give away the identifying Widevine Client ID with no or little explicit consent from users. Moreover, we characterize the privacy risks of users tracking when browsers miss applying EME guidelines regarding privacy. Because of being closed-source, our work involves reverse engineering to dissect the contents of EME messages as instantiated by Widevine. Finally, we implement EME Track, a tool that automatically exploits bad Widevine-based implementations to break privacy.
Keywords: Web Privacy, Web Tracking, DRM, EME, Widevine
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